The 112 and 110 emergency numbers were down in several German states on Thursday morning. Most services have since been restored, but authorities haven’t yet discovered the cause of the outage. 

Calls to police and fire brigade in Germany failing

Early on Thursday morning, emergency services across Germany confirmed that calls for urgent assistance being made to the police and fire departments were not going through. 

The Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) announced that problems were being experienced with the 112 and 110 numbers in a handful of federal states, including Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg and Brandenburg, and in a number of major German cities, like Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt and Hamburg. 

Emergency service numbers now mostly restored

The BBK said later that emergency numbers had been restored, but that the cause of the disruption had not yet been identified. “There was disruption in the emergency numbers early this morning. This has since been resolved. Error analysis on the part of Telekom is already underway,” a spokesperson told DW. 

Investigators are looking into what caused the issue, but say in the meantime that if an emergency number can’t be reached, those needing assistance are being advised to call their local police station or fire department directly. 

A similar outage was reported in Germany at the end of September this year, when the police and fire brigade could not be reached for up to 40 minutes. The reason for that failure was given as a nationwide disruption in the telecommunications network.